In the Drink (13 page)

I tapped Frieda on the shoulder and said in her ear, “Will you be all right if I leave now?”

She looked up at me. “Do not go home with him,” she said. She looked drunk and radiant.

“Frieda. We’re just going for a walk.”

“Walk fast,” she said, and gave me a light slap on the cheek.

John and I fought our way out of the bar. He squired me along the pavement. A deli lay just ahead at the next corner, its brightly lit tiers of fruits and flowers bristling against the muted wash of buildings and parked cars. “I need a beer,” I said. “And one of those little Table Talk pies.”

He came back with two bagged, opened bottles and two small square boxes. I checked to see what flavor he’d chosen for me and saw with joy that it was apple. I ripped the box open and sank my teeth into the flaky, gummy thing. He watched me eat it. I felt short of breath all of a sudden.

“I’m starving,” he said, and took a bite out of my pie, steadying my hand with his. I watched him chew and swallow. A crumb sat on his upper lip. I wanted to lick it off, even though I wasn’t hungry any more.

“Eat your own damn pie,” I said. We exchanged a hot, half-lidded stare until I looked away with a huge grin.

He ran a thumb over my eyelids, then put his palm flat against my face and pressed it gently against my nose. “You’re so tense,” he said. “You should relax your face.”

“I should relax a lot of things.”

“I forgot to tell you,” he said into my hair, “Rima’s visiting her family in Bucharest until tomorrow night.” An involuntary little grunt came from deep in my throat. He hailed a passing
cab and gave the driver his address. We sat side by side on the wide cracked seat, not talking or touching. My head buzzed with internal static. John paid the driver and we got out.

John and Rima shared a cramped two-room attic apartment at the top of a former blacksmith’s shop on Pitt Street. We passed through a gate and a courtyard, then climbed a narrow dim wooden staircase to the top floor. The bathtub sat by the door, covered with a wooden hinged lid that served as a sideboard until someone needed to take a bath. There were books piled on every surface, bookshelves crammed full and spilling over. Under the eaves of the pitched roof was John’s worktable, haphazardly cluttered with a box of plain white paper, stacks of half-typewritten, half-handwritten pages, a jar of ballpoint pens, a dictionary and a manual typewriter. On a hook by the door was a frilly pink piece of lingerie, the only sign I could see of the missus.

The moment John ushered me in and locked the door behind us, I turned into a rubber doll that could be bent and contorted into any position. I found myself face down on the bathtub lid, my cheek against a box of cornflakes, my thighs spread in his hands, his chin between my shoulder blades, his breath in my ear. Then I was facing the sink, palms pressed flat against the cabinets overhead, one knee up on the edge of the sink. I slipped into a dazed, muted euphoria, squeezed myself into a hard compact ball so tiny it was almost gone, a black hole of antimatter located in my navel. A while later I resurfaced to discover that I had become some sort of ottoman: I was down on the rug, supporting his heavy weight on my back, bracing myself on hands and knees against the rhythmic onslaught while the hairs on his chest and stomach rasped against my skin. He picked me up and I wrapped my arms and legs around him and rode him like a merry-go-round horse while he
steadied himself against the windowsill. Anyone looking up from below would have seen his bare butt squashed against the glass, my face rising and falling above the back of his head, and several moments later would have heard him give a yell that rattled the windowpanes.

We lay on the threadbare brown rug, naked, drinking whiskey; we never went near the big rumpled trampoline of a bed he shared with Rima. Why it was less adulterous to slide all over the fixtures and furniture I didn’t know, but it was. I wasn’t at all sleepy; I almost forgot that I had to be at work in a few hours. John’s big stomach sat comfortably in front of his torso and his big soft limbs took up space without apology for their lack of muscle tone. He looked like a member of a cerebral, ineffectual alien species in a science-fiction movie, with hairy sloping shoulders, hands as formless and soft as mittens, eyes far apart in his top-heavy, domelike head. He wrapped his body around me, tugged at my hair as if it were a bolt of cloth he was buying, buried his face between my breasts. My entire body always felt tender and slightly raw after a bout with him, as if I’d been pummeled softly all over with rubber mallets.

“What are you working on these days?” he asked earnestly as he pinned me against the rug. It was time for our little talk about my writing.

I intoned in a quavering falsetto, “That dark-skinned foreign man had a gun, and he was pointing it at me! My heart beat like a timpani!”

He rubbed his cheek against my stomach, laid his ear flat so he could hear all the gurgling noises in there, which he had once told me made him feel as if he were back in the womb. “You were always going to start your own novel. What happened to that?”

“I’ll do it when I do it, and if I don’t, it’s no one’s loss.” I
felt an ache behind my eyeballs and in my leg joints, a prickle along my skin that meant it was almost dawn. “How’s the bricklayer?”

“Ah,” he said, propping his chin on my breastbone so he could look directly up at me. “Poor man. Poor mule. Every brick has to be perfectly aligned with every other brick or the whole wall will go off-kilter. One fraction of an inch off and the wall gets more crooked with every succeeding course. How does he keep at it, brick after brick, day after day, without going out of his mind?”

“Why doesn’t he just get a better job?”

“Because bricklaying is his trade,” said John significantly. “It’s hard, and it’s tedious, and backbreaking and lonely, but he’s chosen it.”

I had nothing to say to this. I reached for the whiskey bottle.

“Claudia,” he said after a while. “I can’t leave Rima, you know that, right?”

“I know.” I poured a little whiskey into my mouth. “I would never ask you to, don’t worry.”

“But it’s so hard for me,” he said. “I miss you all the time.”

“Oh, come on, John, no one misses anyone all the time.”

“I mean it,” he said vehemently, then he burst into tears. He sobbed through his nose into his clenched fists, his stomach heaving. “I’m all she has. I can’t take it any more.”

I got up on my haunches and cradled his head. His hair was as densely matted and dusty as the fur of an indoor pet. The shed condom, weighted with its tiny cargo, lay curled on the edge of the rug.

At around six, just before the sun rose, we went to an all-night Ukrainian diner and ate plates of potato pancakes with sour cream and applesauce. John paid the bill and left me at the
entrance to the subway. “It was sublime in the best sense, seeing you again, Claudia,” he said, holding both my hands in his.

I smiled at him, took my hands back, and went down the stairs to the platform. It was almost seven; I had just enough time to get home, shower and change, and walk to work.

In the shower I had to brace myself with a hand against the tiles; as I walked out of the park onto Fifth Avenue, fatigue hit me like a hard wind and I was momentarily so dizzy I had to sit down on a bench. I almost fell asleep, but caught myself just in time and made myself get up and keep walking. My brain felt as if it were wrapped in cotton batting. My eyes wouldn’t focus properly and my thoughts bumped around my skull haphazardly. I couldn’t imagine how I was going to get through the day in any coherent, orderly manner, but I reminded myself that I’d done it before, which was just reassurance enough to propel me toward Jackie’s building.

When I walked through the door he held open, Ralph gave me an uncharacteristically restrained “Good morning.”

“Hi, Ralph,” I said. “What’s wrong?”

He looked at me as if he weren’t really seeing me and said in a bewildered, lost voice I’d never heard him use before, “The old lady’s gone.”

At first I thought she had left on a trip I had forgotten she was taking, which could easily have happened, and I stared at him in a panic. “Gone?” I said. “Gone where?”

“Gone gone,” he said dazedly. “I can’t believe it.”

“What do you mean, gone gone?”

“She passed away.”

I stared at him. “You mean she’s dead?”

“Just like that,” he said with a weak smile. “I always thought she would live forever.”

“My God,” I whispered. “So did I.” All at once I remembered
the radio, my jubilant and insouciant departure yesterday evening. I stared wide-eyed at him, amazed beyond comprehension. No. Could it be? Impossible. But he’d said—a prairie opened in my head, grass blowing to the horizon, fresh wind, blue sky. “How did it happen?” I asked. “Who told you?”

“Ralph dear,” called Mrs. Florscheim, who lived on the sixth floor and was emerging from the elevator, “could you get me a taxicab?”

Ralph gave me a wordless look, then went out to the sidewalk, fumbling in his shirt for his whistle.

I looked through the French doors to the courtyard. I could go out there now if I wanted to and sit on a bench by the fountain. The mirrors lining the lobby were neutral now; I didn’t need them any more to warn me of my sagging hemlines and windblown hair. My whole body shifted slightly in the suddenly weaker gravitational pull exerted by the building. I bounded to the elevator and rose just ahead of it to her apartment.

I unlocked her door and stood in the foyer for a moment, stunned by a wild, remorseless joy. An understanding of what I had done tried to force itself into my mind like an ocean liner at the mouth of a smallish river. I oscillated between the two realities, Jackie alive yesterday, Jackie dead today, a keen buzz of adrenaline fizzing through my veins. I whispered the word “murderer” to myself; it had a plummy, luscious sound, completely unrelated to the gavel’s whipcrack or the crackle of the electric chair. There on the back of the chair was one red-gold hair, there a lipsticked Kleenex she’d dropped in the wastebasket. The residue of her perfume rode the currents of air eddying in the doorways.

“Juanita,” I called, suddenly hearing for the first time the vacuum cleaner roaring somewhere, but she couldn’t hear me over the noise, and didn’t answer.

Through the arched doorway, the living room was a baroque cavern awash in glimmers and shadows. The two dozen roses Jimmy Blevins had sent yesterday were in a brass jar on the low mahogany table; dark crimson petals already spattered the rug. I plunged in among gold-plated paperweights and bronze horsemen on marble stands. The shining surfaces bent and wavered as if in the play of light from sunlit waves high above. I rubbed a gold dagger-shaped letter opener and left an oily smudge, then leaned toward the roses to inhale their rich perfume. They looked like soft rock-clinging undersea animals, all mouth.

I went down the hall, through her bedroom to the bathroom. The blank tiles gleamed dully. The tub was empty. The air felt hollow, as if a cold dense fog had been and gone.

The shower shelf was in the wastebasket under the sink, and the handle had broken off.

The radio was on the side of the bathtub, no longer plugged in.

I ran my fingers around the inside of the tub. No cleanser grit or hardened minerals came away on my fingers. The porcelain sides were as glossily nacreous as the inside of an oyster shell, and completely dry.

I saw, as if on a movie screen, Jackie reaching up to adjust the volume, her impatient hand tugging at the knob, the radio in mid-air, Jackie frantically trying to catch it. The water twitching with power like a live thing, roiling over her heaving body—her eyes staring emptily at the ceiling. A heightened touch (imagined for my own purposes): bubbling up from the radio under the water, Frank Sinatra’s voice, “I’ve got you under my skin; I’ve got you deep in the heart of me …”

I went out and sat in one of the leopard-print chairs in the boudoir and picked up the phone. I dialed the number for
downstairs. Louie answered. “Louie, it’s Claudia,” I said. “Is Ralph around?”

“He’s on break. Can I help you with something?”

“Did you hear about Jackie?”

He laughed. “No, what did she do now?”

“No, Louie, it’s not that. Jackie’s dead.”

“What do you mean, she’s dead?”

“You haven’t heard? Ralph told me this morning when I got here.”

“No, I had no idea,” he said.

“Could you ask Ralph to call me right away?”

“I’m on my way up to fix a leak on three,” he said, “but you could try him in a few minutes, he’s due back soon. So how did she, uh—what happened to her?”

“I don’t know,” I said, “that’s what I’m calling to find out.”

“I’ll leave him a note to call up there,” said Louie.

I hung up. This was serious; I had to think, and I was unable to think. My muscles seized up and my face went rigid. A teak chest crouched next to me. On a stand just above my head lurked a silk spider plant, ready to spring. The daylight was blocked by red velvet curtains and inadequately replenished by standing lamps with heavy fringed silk shades. Acorn-sized bulbs burned dimly in sconces along the wall opposite the mirror. The walls were papered with a hand-painted fantasia of enormous genitalesque crimson flowers on leafy stalks; a fecund array of fake ferns and bamboo trees was doubled by its reflection in the mirror-covered wall behind it. Everything seemed cartoonish and unreal in the theatrical pomp of this room. “She made me look through the trash,” I could hear myself whining in court, “and all along the picture was upstairs in an envelope where she herself had put it.”